"Good Ideas, Through the Looking Glass"

[Rich Morin]

Some folks here might find this interesting:

Abstract

An entire potpourri of ideas is listed from the past
decades of Computer Science and Computer Technology.
Widely acclaimed at their time, many have lost in
splendor and brilliance under today's critical
scrutiny. We try to find reasons. Some of the ideas
are almost forgotten. But we believe that they are
worth recalling, not the least because one must try
to learn from the past, be it for the sake of progress,
intellectual stimulation, or fun.

http://www.cs.inf.ethz.ch/~wirth/Articles/GoodIdeas_origFig.pdf
"Good Ideas, Through the Looking Glass"
Niklaus Wirth

-r
--
http://www.cfcl.com/rdm Rich Morin
http://www.cfcl.com/rdm/resume (e-mail address removed)
http://www.cfcl.com/rdm/weblog +1 650-873-7841

Technical editing and writing, programming, and web development

 

[Rich Morin]

FYI, here is a quote which seems relevant to Ruby:

Although the possibility of program modification at
run-time was heralded as one of the great consequences
of John von Neumann's profound idea of storing
program and data in the same memory, it quickly turned
out to enable a dangerous technique and to constitute an
unlimited source of pitfalls. Program code must remain
untouched, if the search for errors was not to become a
nightmae. Program's self-modification was recognized as
an extremely bad idea.
--
http://www.cfcl.com/rdm Rich Morin
http://www.cfcl.com/rdm/resume (e-mail address removed)
http://www.cfcl.com/rdm/weblog +1 650-873-7841

Technical editing and writing, programming, and web development

 

[Morton Goldberg]

That's a gross misinterpretation of the facts. Not on your part --
thanks for posting something interesting -- but on the part of many
self-styled pundits. The fact that self-modifying code has its own
set of problems doesn't meant that the code should not be pursued
at all, any more than we should have stopped coding altogether the
first time we realized there were such things as bugs.

Not only does self-modifying code still offer the benefits
originally envisioned, but those benefits are finally being
realized. The Java HotSpot VM is a good example of real-world
use. When we are working with high-level languages to write
portable code, we usually don't mind if the machine code changes on
the fly according to provably valid rules.

Yes, indeed.

Wirth's criticism is probably valid in the context of developing code
for tax accountants. But in the context of developing code intended
to pass the Turing test, his criticism is completely fatuous. A well-
know AI researcher once said something like: if our programs can't
modify themselves, then they will never do anything very interesting.
Was is Shank? Was it Minsky? I can't remember.

Regards, Morton

 

[John Gabriele]

[snip] A well-
know AI researcher once said something like: if our programs can't
modify themselves, then they will never do anything very interesting.
Was is Shank? Was it Minsky? I can't remember.

Not that it's what you're thinking of, but I read "The Story of Mel" a
long while back ( http://www.pbm.com/~lindahl/mel.html ), and recall
this quote:

|
| I had been hired to write a Fortran compiler for this new marvel and
| Mel was my guide to its wonders. Mel didn't approve of compilers.
|
| "If a program can't rewrite its own code," he asked, "what good is it?"
|

Fun little read, btw, though quite off-topic here.

---John

 

[Martin Coxall]

| I had been hired to write a Fortran compiler for this new marvel and

| Mel was my guide to its wonders. Mel didn't approve of compilers.
|
| "If a program can't rewrite its own code," he asked, "what good is it?"
|

Fun little read, btw, though quite off-topic here.

Metaprogramming is the new COME FROM statement.

;p

Martin